If you have been playing poker on a Mac then you haven’t been using a HUD and statistics program because one hasn’t existed – until now. Sure, you could probably run Boot Camp or Parallels, install Windows XP or Vista, and install either HEM or PokerTracker 3. The financial cost for selling our souls to Bill Gates? Well Parallels runs about $60, XP will cost you $100, and HEM runs another $45 , making the total cost in the neighborhood of $200 for running a piece software in a downgraded environment. Is this the kind of Mac life we want to live in? Heck no. Those people at the Mac Store might burn down our houses too if they saw we actually installed Vista on our slick iMac!
Enter “Poker Co-Pilot” , a new software currently in development with a retail release for the Mac OSX operating system and runs in conjunction with your favorite online poker room – either FullTilt Poker or PokerStars.
Installation
Fortunately for those of you wary of buying programs, Poker Co-Pilot comes with an unlimited 30-day trial which has no features locked. The software is exclusively available online from the Poker Co-Pilot website and takes only minutes to download over a broadband connection.
Installing Poker Co-Pilot is extremely easy even for novice Mac users. Just double click to open up the DMG file, double click on that, and then drag the Poker Co-Pilot icon into your “Applications” folder. From there you are ready to get started!
Opening up the program for the first time takes you to the dashboard, armed with a very handy “Detect Casinos” button which will auto-find your poker room software and specific hand history save directory. My installation and detection worked like a charm the first time and the software diligently found my hand history save directories immediately. Total installation time from clicking the “download” to getting the program totally configured was less than 5 minutes.
Importing your existing hands will take no time. I dragged in a ton of hand history files from PokerStars equaling about 6,000 hands. The program imported all those hands in less than 20 seconds – very impressive.
Program Features
Here’s a checklist of features and comments about those features as listed from the Poker Co-Pilot website.
- Supports PokerStars and FullTilt Poker: These are the only two sites currently supported by the program
- Exclusively for Mac OSX: Obviously … otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about it
- Analyzes your opponents while you play: The program takes the most basic statistics from your hand histories. For example you can see the VPIP/PFR/AG% and something like 3bet%, but stats like “Fold to 3bet” or even “4bet” do not exist at this time within the program.
- Easy to use, easy to understand: Poker Co-Pilot is the easiest program out of the three I’ve seen (with HEM and PT3 being the other two) to interface and use. Yay for Mac people.
- Price of $49.99: This retail price competitively prices the program against the others, however, with its lack of depth in the program the cost may not be justified at this time.
- Cash game and Tournament Support: The MTT features and graphs are a lot of fun to look at and entering in tournament results is an easy and painless experience.
Interface & HUD
The program itself is very straightforward and gives you the basic stats. The stats that you can have available on the HUD include:
% of flops seen, % Aggression, Aggression Factor, VPIP, Take in the Blinds, Steal %, % check-raised, 3 bet, and Number of Hands
Obviously for players that are already using PT3 or HEM this is a minimal amount of stats. Big time cash game players will not benefit from just these statistics as more stats (like Fold to 3bet %) are critical in decision making. However, for the SNG or MTT player that only plays one or two tables at a time, these stats are definitely sufficient to give you an edge at the tables.
The HUD itself is not your traditional HUD, as it does not overlay right on the table and break out each player’s stats in its own box so you can move it next to their avatar. The HUD is one singular block holding all players’ statistics and can be displayed in “stats mode” where you get the raw numbers listed in columns, or in “graph” mode which is where your toggled stats (which ones you want to show up) are shown.
Here’s the HUD in “stats” mode, which is the most useful mode:
Alternatively you can take a look at the graph mode as well:
This type of HUD (in either mode) will simply not work if you play more than 2 tables at once. If you play a SNG and an MTT or a single cash game table while plodding through an MTT/SNG then the HUD is definitely serviceable and highly recommended to the alternative – nothing.
Getting into the program you can easily toggle between Tournament and Cash Game stats with the press of a button and the main screen “Dashboard” gives you an overall look at your stats both for your given duration and for today. Running through the Summaries allows you to look through specific hands (like AA, KK, 72o, etc), look at specific players in your database, or even break down stats by position.
The charts area looks like once it’s done will be a highlight feature of the program. You can make some custom charts now but some of the data that it produces doesn’t seem to be accurate, however the important main stuff (aka “how much have I won this month”) works just fine.
Known Issues
It seems that some statistics aren’t compiled accurately. For example with this month’s stats it shows that I 3bet 1% of the time, however in HEM it shows that I 3bet 5% of the time. Since I am aware of my play, I know that I certainly am not 3betting only 1% of the time. Another issue is that the stats you pick in the HUD preferences panel only show up for the “graph” display and not the stats display. Also, there is no hand replayer within the program.
Updates in Development
We got word that Poker Co-Pilot is software at this point “in development” (as of December, 2008) and updates that include a traditional HUD and additional stats are coming in future builds. You can check out their development blog that appears to be updated regularly at http://blog.pokercopilot.com/. I saw a beta version of a new HUD and tried installing it, but even after I configured my OSX to allow what the program asked me to (something in the special access preferences) the “new” HUD never showed up, but the “classic” HUD worked as normal.
Final Comments
If you are a Mac OSX poker player and refuse (as you probably rightfully should) to purchase and install all the components necessary for playing poker and keeping stats on a Mac, then you should definitely look into Poker Co-Pilot. If you understand that this little piece of software is just an infant but has the potential to be a bright star, then you’ll definitely get the most out of it. It’s recommended only if you typically 2 or at the most 4 table, and don’t require anything more than the most basic of poker statistics. For now you might just want to check out the free 30 day trial and wait until a version comes along with a traditional HUD, fixed stat compiling, and a more robust selection of available statistics.
Poker Co-Pilot can be found at http://www.PokerCoPilot.com
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